Corpus Christi’s first school was conducted in a store in 1846

Amanda Brooks, shown in later years, taught students in a vacant room of John P. Kelsey’s store on Water Street in ...more

Amanda Brooks, shown in later years, taught students in a vacant room of John P. Kelsey’s store on Water Street in 1846. She was Corpus Christi’s first school teacher. Charles Lovenskiold, from Denmark, opened the Corpus Christi Academy in 1853 in an adobe-brick building on Mesquite Street.

Amanda Brooks taught classes in a room of John Kelsey’s dry goods store on Water Street. That was in 1846. She was a graduate of Marietta Seminary in Marietta, Ohio, who came to Corpus Christi with her parents, Abidja and Laura Brooks. She was 17.

Amanda Brooks’ father was killed soon after they arrived when he was thrown from his horse. A delegation of businessmen led by Kelsey urged Miss Brooks to open a school and free space was offered in Kelsey’s store.

Amanda Brooks taught 40 students. Tuition was $2 per child per month. The teacher and storekeeper married in October 1847 and lived in Kelsey’s home on Chaparral. They moved to Rio Grande City in 1848.

Kelsey sold his store to D.H. de Meza and his wife, who came to Corpus Christi from the Dutch West Indies. The Corpus Christi Star said Mrs. De Meza would open a school on Oct. 9, 1848, in the store where Amanda Brooks had taught. She would teach English, reading, writing, grammar, geography, history, French, Spanish, and needlework. The school was short-lived. Within a month the Star lamented that Corpus Christi had neither church nor school.

In 1849, C.C. Farley and W.W. Whitley opened the Corpus Christi Academy in a small building at Chaparral and Lawrence. The school closed when Farley departed to teach in Austin.

Four years later, Charles Lovenskiold, from Denmark, opened the Corpus Christi Academy. Lovenskiold, a lawyer, moved from New Orleans to Corpus Christi with the encouragement of Corpus Christi founder Henry Kinney. Lovenskiold arranged to bring three instructors from Illinois to teach in his academy, including M.P. Craft, Mary Gordon and Julia Marsh. The school was in an adobe-brick building on Mesquite Street across from where Spohn Park is today. Andrew Anderson recalled that the school had small wooden desks and benches.

The Nueces Valley on Jan. 2, 1857, reported that the school would begin its new term on Jan. 11 and remain in session for 11 months. The cost was $30 per year per student. Trustees of the academy were merchant Frederick Belden, Capt. S.W. Fullerton, and Judge M.P. Norton.

It was a private school. Tuition was paid by the parents, but it did have public money. Teachers submitted tabular statements showing the number of days attended by students who could not afford to pay tuition. The amounts were reimbursed by the county from its free school fund.

Lovenskiold stressed habits of order and cleanliness and insisted that students come to school clean. They lined up in military order for inspection and those with improper clothes or dirty fingernails were sent home. Unruly students were fitted with a dunce cap.

When Lovenskiold left to practice law, he named M.P. Craft as principal. At the beginning of 1860 the school held exercises, including declamations and dialogues, to show that the students had learned all the things that couldn’t be of the slightest use to them. The academy struggled during the Civil War before it closed in 1862.

Rosalie Priour taught elementary-age students in her mother’s old store on Water Street during the last two years of the war.

The Catholic Church opened the Hidalgo Seminary in 1863. It was a school for boys in a two-story concrete building at Lipan and Tancahua. The Hidalgo Seminary was founded by Father John Gonnard, a missionary from France. Father Gonnard loved boats and would run down to the waterfront when a ship came in.

Eli Merriman, who attended the Hidalgo Seminary, said it was one of the best schools in Texas. Pupils came from Laredo to Victoria and points in between. Most of them boarded at private homes in town while a few boarded at the school. Students were taught moral and spiritual lessons and academic subjects.

The school was managed by the Catholic Church with Father Gonnard at the head. He employed two teachers, William Shakespeare Campion and William Carroll, known as “Little” Carroll. (Carroll’s niece, Mary Carroll, would one day become superintendent of Corpus Christi’s public schools.) Campion, from Galveston, was educated in Switzerland and taught school in San Antonio before he moved to Corpus Christi.

When Thomas Noakes was preparing to teach school at Nuecestown in 1865, he spent a day at the Hidalgo Seminary observing how William Carroll conducted his class. Noakes noted in his diary that the teacher copied the writing lesson on the board and pupils recopied it on their slates. Every student would recite what he had written. This was followed by spelling, geography and arithmetic, in which the students went over the multiplication table with Carroll copying sums on the blackboard. When the sums were completed, the students took their slates up for the teacher’s inspection.

Maria Blucher in a letter to parents dated Oct. 4, 1866, said her children were back in school. “They go to Hidalgo Seminary, an excellent school. They are at lessons from 8 in the morning to 5 in the evening. Their studies are English, Spanish, French, arithmetic, geography, history, writing, reading, drawing, etc. they all make excellent progress and are eager to learn.”

Father Gonnard died in the yellow fever outbreak of 1867. The church hired Robert Dougherty to run the school. Kate Dougherty (later Mrs. Vincent Bluntzer) said her father taught older boys in the large hall upstairs while her mother taught smaller boys in a room downstairs.

Dougherty left in 1874 to establish his own school at Round Lake near San Patricio. One of the original teachers, William Shakespeare Campion, was hired to teach and supervise the Hidalgo Seminary. It remained open for another three years until 1877 when it was closed.

Eli Merriman speculated that if Father Gonnard hadn’t died in 1867 the Hidalgo Seminary “would probably have grown to be one of the great educational institutions in the state.” As it was, from 1863 to 1877, the Hidalgo Seminary was the most important school in Corpus Christi.

(This is the first of four columns on the early history of education in Corpus Christi, from 1846 to 1929.)

Caller-Times columnist Murphy Givens, June 2014.

Caller-Times columnist Murphy Givens, June 2014.

Contributed photo

Murphy Givens is the retired Viewpoints Editor of the Caller-Times. Email him at givens.murphy@gmail.com.